7.
STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER or: painting, there's no tomorrow
An exhibition of paintings of birds, humans and all living things
otherwise - captured picturesque and drawings in the works of artists
Chiz Turn Ross (Liverpool) and Rolf Jahn (Cologne)
Footballer wide after they scored a goal, arms out wide like wings,
as they would take off from the ground at any moment. Probably in
every man lies the desire to once again to be a bird and hover above
the earth across to. Like Icarus with his wings of wax. However, he
was too frivolous, the sun came too close and crashed. The imagination
of people flying is as old as mankind. And are myths, fairy tales
and dreams of bird figures it since the dawn of the world. Angels
are not too mysterious hybrid creatures, half man and half bird, animated
by the divine spark? We know the history of cloud cuckoo land where
the birds turned likenesses of people. We know the story of the talking
raven. And we know the movie about the birds that are unpredictable
to attackers by bringing the weirdness of nature with sharp beaks
and dives into our lives. The brutal bluntness of the attacking birds
of prey is the one, the Gewitzheit the sparrows and the delicacy of
the other hummingbirds. The poetry and the ease of colorful birds
in the trees are cawing of the crows over to graves. And the loud
screeching of gulls in the harbor is a wild flutter up in a soft glide
on the wind. It's no wonder the winged figures are a fascinating subject
for artists. Of the angels of medieval art on the natural history
bird studies watercolors from the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment,
of the darting bird splashes of color to the picturesque field landscapes
of Vincent van Gogh to the bizarre strichigen bird creature on the
drawings of Paul Klee. The mythology of the birds is as enchanting
as the ornithological observation of its anatomy and its plumage coloration.
The psychological view about the birds and flying is as interesting
as their symbolism.
Of all of these bird's eye images of the act Liverpudlian artist Chiz
Turn Ross and the Cologne painter and draftsman Rolf Jahn. They show
inconspicuous and exotic, playful and strange people. They show jumping
and hovering birds, birds in motionless persistence and birds in flight.
Birds that bring us to dream, and birds that make us afraid. Birds
that are alien to us, and those birds that are familiar to us as the
birds in our own heads. Vivid color and cheerful when it comes to
views of the picturesque birds of both artists, until we notice when
looking at their pictures, which even the most beautiful wings has
two sides. The bird that keeps us alive with just a flutter bothers
us in the next moment. So bring Rolf Jahn animal-human hybrids bluntly
expressed stuck what different (psychological) feelings in us. We
stand with both feet on the ground and want it off the ground. We
believe in the person of our identity, but then us a wing from the
edge and grow our head is reduced to a large bird eye. Jahns human
beings and animal wing Menschlein show how close reality and fantasy,
booms and busts are to each other. The song of the robin is the cry
of the first bird, which still haunts in the obscure realms of our
spiritual life. The bird is an archetypal motif. And Rolf Jahn pictures
go far back in a time of our lives, as we use the words is not as
well controlled, and we have not been determined by the (practical)
reason. The art of the 1962-born artist takes us inevitably back to
a childhood world. But this does not mean that he would like to paint
a child. With the sovereignty of an artist who runs the graphic line
of playful and is not afraid of bright colors to year, maintaining
quality, childlike imagery and so childlike imagination. Exactly that
is something rare in adult humans. Children see and explore the world
known differently from adults. The painting and the inseparably associated
changing formations fantasy play for children in this discovery an
important role. In working times can be anything and everything test.
You can like a bird flying across continents and oceans of time from
one to the other end of the world. You can draw with his beak the
secret of life as a worm out of the ground. And you can ignore the
laws of gravity. As the sudden appearance of birds from the air Jahn
developed from the conscious-unconscious fantasies approach funny
and weird creatures, emerge in which birds and fish and humans apart
and merge drawing, painting is for Jahn Transform. And since his childhood
until today paints Jahn, like mad to keep the infinite transformation
possibilities of life on track.
This also applies to those living in Liverpool painters and musicians
Chiz Teurnross. Jahn as he is an outspoken lot painter. Jahn and how
he dances with his brushstrokes between birds and human beings back
and forth. Coarsely painted with rich colors he captures the shape
of the flap being, to bring their fineness expressed. And a sheet
of paper just the painted bird hops inevitably already to the next
sheet of paper by the artist's hand flies on painting. Born in 1965
as a scenic vista turn Ross brings a whole flock of birds on the wall.
He allows the winged creatures freedom to hundreds of sheets of paper
fluttering in the closed spaces, where curiously, not the birds, but
people suddenly appear as prisoners. His flocks of birds mingle in
our familiar urban interiors, and they bring us in motion. Turn Ross
bird paintings seem at first glance serene. But by the second or third
glance reveals a quite dramatic world, are the success and failure,
happiness and misery, both familiar and strange to the extreme close.
His birds are sad shadows, in the power of their colors is a gentle
melancholy. And also has a relationship to the images of Rolf Jahn.
If you look closely, an increase in all the inspiring pictures of
birds sometimes even breathe. Since pretty dicey life maneuvers are
visible. Daring here frightening there, often both. An intriguing
seriousness connected seems to in joy, a heaviness in the lightness.
We suspect suddenly realize that our picture of the lightness of the
bird is more than our projection of the reality of the birds. The
Fly against the wind is not an easy affair. And not a few birds are
eaten mercilessly. That's life: the birds, the people. Bird fantasies
go far back in our childhood, and far back in the history of culture.
Birds are an ideal design to bring elemental themes of life expressed.
Both artists, Chiz Turn Ross and Rolf Jahn share, not only this insight.
They also follow a similar sense of the painting as a sensory process
in which each image is always the transition to the next image. And
that both of them, their bird forms as graffiti or paint a mural on
the walls of the city, is another commonality. On their way home or
into the distance over the houses of Liverpool and Cologne fly over
the same birds. That's a nice fantasy. And who knows the routes of
the birds?
Exhibition at the Art Room 27
Walter Rathenau-Straße 27.50996 Cologne, Tel: 0221-393851
7.10. to 7.11.
Opening: 07/10/2012, 15 clock
Open: Thurs, Fri 15-20 clock, Sat 11-14 clock
